Old World Masters in New World Collections
9781465500410
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
There are no beginnings of art in Italy. The old civilizations of Etruria, Rome, and Byzantium never perished entirely; and upon their surviving traditions “Christian Art” was built. Old pictorial ideas and old decorative motives were absorbed, rearranged, and worked over again and again in conjunction with theological dogma until in the Thirteenth Century, largely owing to the beautiful character, ideals, and influence of St. Francis, to the intellectual teachings of Dante, and to the fervor aroused by the Crusades, “Christian Art” became a living movement, which inspired, among other important things, the creation of magnificent Cathedrals. When the architects, the carvers of wood and stone, and the makers of the jewel-like windows had finished their work, the best painters of the day were called on to produce altar-pieces that would stimulate religious devotion, charm the worshippers by beauty, and instruct the people (unaccustomed to books) by representation of saintly lives and scriptural stories. Italian Painting in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries thus shows many of the old Byzantine traditions still lingering in the new “Christian,” or “Gothic Art.” Siena and Florence were the chief early Italian Schools. Siena was at first the more important of the two and greatly influenced Florentine and also French Painting. The leading early artists of Siena were Guido da Siena, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Ugolino da Siena, Segna di Bonaventura, Simone Martini, Lippo Memmi, Pietro Lorenzetti, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Lippo Vanni, Andrea Vanni, Bartolo di Fredi, Taddeo di Bartolo, and Stefano di Giovanni (Sassetta). The next group includes Domenico di Bartolo, Lorenzo Vecchietta, Neroccio di Landi, Benvenuto di Giovanni, Girolamo di Benvenuto, and Matteo di Giovanni. “To understand and appreciate the painting of Siena one should think of it as the culmination of the art of the Middle Ages rather than as a promise of anything modern. Therein lies the difference which caused so great a gulf between the art of Siena and that of contemporary Florence only forty miles away. Sienese Art may be regarded as the most perfect expression of the Byzantine ideal. It was hieratic and mystic. While Giotto was forecasting the development of modern art by studying nature and making his figures act like the real people whom he saw about him, Duccio and Simone Martini were sounding the Byzantine creed that the Christian saints were not human but divine, not vulgar but regal, not approachable but aloof. To the early Sienese, as to the Byzantine, the Raphaelesque conception of the Madonna as the most tender possible human mother would have been blasphemous bad taste. “Although Sienese Art was founded on Byzantine and was in a sense the culmination of Byzantine, it was, nevertheless, a Gothic art. In other words it belonged to its period, but it selected certain elements of Gothic style for emphasis. “In Florence Giotto was inspired by the plasticity of Gothic Art and its naturalism. In Siena Duccio and his followers developed the Gothic living line; and, later, the emotionalism of Gothic spirit. Thus both Florentines and Sienese were Gothic, but in a different way. “Technically as well as spiritually, the Sienese approached the artistic abstractions of China and Japan. The analogies between Sienese and Oriental Art have been observed by practically every writer on the Sienese School. They have been tacitly attributed however, to accidental similarities in ideals and modes in Siena and the East.
